On Oct. 17, 1969, the 14 African- American players on the University
of Wyoming's then-undefeated football team walked into coach Lloyd Eaton's
office wearing black armbands. The team was preparing to play BYU at War
Memorial the next day.
The players had a question. Could they wear black armbands
in silent protest? The year before, in their victory at BYU, they said Cougars
players taunted them with racial epithets. The Wyoming players had also learned
that the Mormon Church, which BYU represents, did not allow African-Americans
in the priesthood.
Eaton, citing a policy against protests, a rule no player
had heard of, said no. He then kicked all 14 off the team for the rest of the
season. Only three would play for Wyoming again.
Mike Robinson was a young white graduate student in the
history program at UW who felt the 14 had a right to protest against BYU. He
and other history students decided to stage their own protest. In this oral
history, he tells the interviewer, historian Mark Junge, who also happened to
be his roommate in college, not only what happened that October in 1969, but
the amazing twist that followed some years later.
Dr. Robinson was a pioneering public works historian who
tirelessly promoted historical research as a component of policy formation. He
was associate editor (with Suellen Hoy) of the American Public Works
Association's bicentennial History of Public Works in the United States, and
wrote Water for the West: The Bureau of Reclamation, 1902-1977. Robinson served
as research coordinator for the Public Works Historical Society, as the first
historian of the Corps of Engineers Mississippi River Commission/Lower
Mississippi Valley Division, and until his death in 1998 was the Division's
Chief of Public Affairs.